Sita's Ramayana

Of all the Ramayanas a Western reader is likely to encounter first, this is the one with the strongest editorial point of view. Samhita Arni’s text is spare; Moyna Chitrakar’s paintings — done in the Patua tradition of West Bengal, the same scroll-painting idiom her family has practiced for generations — carry most of the weight. The book reads top-to-bottom rather than the left-to-right grid of Western comics, which is the right call: it slows the reader down to the pace of the images.

The frame is the choice that makes the book. Sita narrates, mostly in retrospect, from the forest where Rama has banished her after the war is won. She is not bitter exactly, but she has not forgiven him, and the story she tells is not the heroic-rescue version the tradition usually delivers. Ravana’s sister Surpanakha gets her grievance heard. The war’s casualties — vānaras, rakshasas — are not abstractions. And the famous fire ordeal lands with the weight that the older Sanskrit versions always meant it to have and that sanitized retellings tend to drop.

This is not the Ramayana to give a child who has never met the story. For that purpose, Sanjay Patel’s Divine Loophole or a more conventional retelling is the better entry. But for a teenage reader who has read the standard version and is ready to ask harder questions about it, or for an adult who wants to see what a serious folk-art tradition does with the material, Sita’s Ramayana is one of the most important Indian books in English of the last twenty years.

A note on the art: Chitrakar’s Patua style is a living folk tradition, not a revival or pastiche. The book was a collaboration in the truest sense — the paintings came first, the text was written to them. Tara Books in Chennai originally published a hand-bound edition in India in 2011; the Groundwood edition is the widely available English-language version.